Eurogamer recently published a new article examining the PvP aspects of The Empyrean Age, CCP Games' latest expansion for EVE Online. Based on a novel of the same name, Empyrean age focuses on factional warfare and is designed to make PvP combat more accessible to all players.

PVP is an aspect of EVE that really emphasizes how much this is a multiplayer game: you can't hope to learn the ins and outs of combat on your own, and figuring out how best to fly with a gang of other players is where some of the greatest pleasures in EVE lie. Many players, especially ex-players, tell tales of being killed without even an idea of how they might have escaped, and the game does little to explain this to its denizens. It has fallen to the player corporations, and organisations such as Eve Ivy, to try and teach new players what they're up against. What the Empyrean Age is supposed to do is provide another way in to PVP play, giving players who want to indulge in the safety of Empire play most of the time some way to explore the PVP side of the game.

At the very far end of the PVP scale from Empyrean age's tentative steps there are the vast fleet battles involving hundreds, even thousands, of pilots. These have been taking place since the early months of the game, and have now entered a mature phase in which only the major players can expect to compete. Worse, this spectacular endgame of territorial alliance warfare is both tricky to access and laborious, even for hardened players. Getting involved means making a big commitment to the player-run corporations, and demands on time and patience that many players simply can't afford. CCP realises this, and knows that the only way many gamers are going to feel comfortable with player-versus- player combat - which they regard as the spirit of their game - is if it's mediated in some way through the game architecture. That architecture is the missions provided by agents.